56 episodes

Love poetry? Join Robin and Peter and their guests as they read poems, chat about all things poetry and generally explore the bedazzling world of Planet Poetry. Since we started this podcast in 2020 we've interviewed dozens of poets and poetry editors, discussed all the thorny issues about the poetry world and delved into our favourite poetry past and present. We don't have sponsors and we don't interrupt the flow with ads, so if you like what we do, please buy us a coffee or two at buymeacoffee.com/planetpoetry to help keep the poddy going! Thanks!

Planet Poetry Robin Houghton & Peter Kenny

    • Arts

Love poetry? Join Robin and Peter and their guests as they read poems, chat about all things poetry and generally explore the bedazzling world of Planet Poetry. Since we started this podcast in 2020 we've interviewed dozens of poets and poetry editors, discussed all the thorny issues about the poetry world and delved into our favourite poetry past and present. We don't have sponsors and we don't interrupt the flow with ads, so if you like what we do, please buy us a coffee or two at buymeacoffee.com/planetpoetry to help keep the poddy going! Thanks!

    Archive - Inua Ellams from March 2021

    Archive - Inua Ellams from March 2021

    A classic interview from the archive: Inua Ellams talking about his extraordinary book The Actual  (Penned in the Margins, 2020), a powerful, personal and often very funny collection that pokes a sharp stick at the legacy of British Empire, foolish machismo, hero culture, relationships and much more.


    Support the showPlanet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.
    If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!

    • 33 min
    Sorrow | Stored - with Paul Stephenson

    Sorrow | Stored - with Paul Stephenson

    Go on. Press the button. Paul Stephenson guides us through a choice of his varied, formally diverse and moving elegies in his Carcanet collection Hard Drive -- written in the years following his partner's sudden death -- and find a curiously life-affirming  exploration of grief and its aftermath. 

    Robin and Peter also make their way across Europe (simultaneously in both the 21st and the 19th Centuries) in the company of Janet Sutherland whose The Messenger House  (Shearsman Books) is a highly-ambitious  weaving of history, poetry and travelogue. At the border, we flag down Charlotte Gann to examine her  Cargo  -- a characteristically brilliant new pamphlet by  published by Mariscat Press.  And, tugging at the long roots of prosimetra, we find Boethius, Dante, David Jones and a 12th Century bloke called Hugh of Bologna.
    Support the showPlanet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.
    If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!

    • 57 min
    Darkness | Discovered - with Tamar Yoseloff

    Darkness | Discovered - with Tamar Yoseloff

    We are back and delighted to bring you more wonderful poetry in 2024.  So let's illuminate the new year with Tamar Yoseloff, whose  long engagement with visual art  has created a poetry that blazes out against a black backdrop. We’ll hear poems from two Seren collections  A Formula for Night her New and Selected poems and  The Black Place (2019). Plus we will get a preview of her forthcoming collection Belief Systems from Nine Arches.
    And we discuss the highly impressive Self-Portrait as Othello Carcanet Poetry (2023) by Jason Allen-Paisant a deserved winner of this year’s TS Eliot prize -- and talk about a little known scribbler called William Shakespeare.

    Photo of Tamar Yoseloff by Stephen Wells.
    Support the showPlanet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.
    If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!

    • 1 hr 1 min
    Archive | Kim Moore from October 2022

    Archive | Kim Moore from October 2022

    Happy New Year! We're on our festive break, but wanted to share with you another classic interview from the archive. Here's Kim Moore talking about her Forward Prize-winning collection 'All the Men I Never Married' from Seren Books.
    Support the showPlanet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.
    If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!

    • 30 min
    Crossings | Christmas - with Jane Clarke

    Crossings | Christmas - with Jane Clarke

    Psssst! Here's a moment of reprieve from the festive frenzy... Follow Jane Clarke wobbling on an oak log slick with frost, then she smooths us down a butter path to a place of poetry. Here we revel in the beauty and quiet authority of Jane's collection  A Change in the Air shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot prize among others.

    Peter finds listening to a Christmas carol to be a slippery slope to goblin greengrocers and secretive Christina Rossetti, while Robin rouses the old possum and revisits Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot. And, as if that weren't enough, we neatly put a bow in the red ribbon of the show, with Congregation, a Christmas poem from Jeremy Page

    Thanks so much for listening to Planet Poetry in 2023. Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone. Here's wishing you a Peaceful New Year!   
    Support the showPlanet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.
    If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!

    • 1 hr 1 min
    Bridges | Broken - with Martyn Crucefix

    Bridges | Broken - with Martyn Crucefix

    Go on. We dare you to reach across the gulf to Planet Poetry. This time you'll find Martyn Crucefix, reading poems from his Salt collection Between A Drowning Man. This ambitious, timely work depicts  the isolation and polarisation brought about by Brexit, Populism, social media and more.  A deep and subtle work that reflects these troubled times, and yearns towards empathy.  
    Then let's delight in a poem from Clare Best’s new book Beyond The Gate   and gaze into the mutable future: reporting back from a first encounter with Changing by Richard Berengarten, a magnum opus inspired by a lifetime of association with the I Ching  --  the ancient Chinese text used for divination.

    But there's one thing you can be 100% sure of: the usual banter from your pals Robin and Peter as they grasp another prickly poetic nettle.    
    Support the showPlanet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.
    If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!

    • 1 hr 2 min

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